Cast

Photo Gallery

Shakers

Reviews

What do you do for a main-house show when the masculine part of your repertory company is busy touring secondary schools and sixth-form colleges with John Godber and Jane Thornton’s Bouncers? You make the obvious choice – and mount the sister show Shakers. What&rs…

What do you do for a main-house show when the masculine part of your repertory company is busy touring secondary schools and sixth-form colleges with John Godber and Jane Thornton’s Bouncers? You make the obvious choice – and mount the sister show Shakers. What’s more, as Bouncers is playing in a cut-down version, you throw in some cut-price performances of it as a curtain-raiser.

Matt Devitt is the director for the fast-moving examination of four girls serving cocktails in a not-so-smart part of town. They’re there basically because it’s the only job on offer, not because it’s a career choice. Carole wants to use her degree to become a professional photographer. Adele has a young daughter to bring up, on her own. Mel hopes to settle down with Steve, but will her past with Paul catch up with her? Nicky just wants to get on with life.

There has been some clever up-dating of the text of the 1985 original (2012 bankers with bonuses and TOWIE stars among them). This has become standard for the play, as with Bouncers, It’s given a glittering set by Claire Lyth, all shine and see-through tables, chairs and bar-stools. The girls wear black with spangled jackets; you can see why the idea of substituting shorts (of the miniscule variety) isn’t a popular idea.

As well as the four waitresses, Natasha Moore (Adele), Rachel Dawson (Carole), Lucy Thornston (Mel) and Laura Pitt-Pulford (Nicky), play a host of customers both male and female, including a raucous 21st birthday celebration party, sundry men on the pull, a chef taking it out in unseemly ways on his over-fussy diners and some ghastly show-off couples. They’re all very good and carry the audience with them.

A stirring Shakers

- Reviewsgate.com

While John Godber directs a revival of his Bouncers on tour, this riposte about young women waitresses, co-written with Jane Thornton, reaches the Queen’s. In southern accents the smart customers sound really posh, moving cocktail-bar Shakers upmarket. But the gap between the wa…

While John Godber directs a revival of his Bouncers on tour, this riposte about young women waitresses, co-written with Jane Thornton, reaches the Queen’s. In southern accents the smart customers sound really posh, moving cocktail-bar Shakers upmarket. But the gap between the waitresses’ plastic smiles and their contemptuous facial expressions behind customer backs, or thoughts spoken out-loud, remain forceful as ever.

Despite necessarily updated references to keep in the swim of today’s Friday nights out, Shakers breathes a 1980s atmosphere of affluence, glittering prices accommodated by credit cards willingly wielded, and a sense of excitement at women empowered, while men still think their commonplace innuendoes come across as wit.

The Shakers sheen is transparently fake. The bubble of easy credit and illusory element of female freedom is clear, with the male boss insisting the women wear shorts. In the end, money, and their need for it, does the talking.

In early productions, the Bouncers-style presentation jumped to the fore, sudden transformation of characters between staff and customers and cross-sex playing (with aptly crude mockery of male body language) grabbing audience attention.

That’s still evident - there’s a wittily-pointed moment of ego-deflation involving adjustable seats – while designer Claire Lyth expresses the frenetically shallow world in sleekly stylish panels and glittering costumes, exuberantly lit by Andy Smart. But the production’s distinguished by the individuality of each character, from graduate Carol who can only land a job here, to Mel for whom waitressing is what’s expected from life and who attacks anyone showing contempt for a job she sees stretching into her future.

The characters’ solo speeches are treated by director Matt Devitt and his cast as insights into each character’s vulnerable core, so they acquire a Shakespearean depth. All are gripping, with Laura Pitt-Pulford’s Nicky especially memorable, as she escapes into a job dancing, Pitt-Pulford exposes the anxieties of someone attempting to reassure herself while gradually exposing what there is to worry about in the life to come. You feel for her, as by the end you do for all four, and for the sad depths behind the shallow glitz and laughter.